This is a backroom at the German Federal Criminal Police, which houses spy evidence for court cases. It could be your garage, but alongside the seemingly innocuous tennis rackets are rows and rows of leather briefcase containers to hide documents and false documents like forged passports.

This carved deer statute with a minox camera – the workhorse of the Cold War -- hidden in the bottom is my favorite concealment. The spy inserts a pin in a hole in the bottom to activate the release mechanism.

During the Cold War a lot of spy paraphernalia was related to smoking. When I visited Mr. Regenhardt at the Criminal Evidence Collection, he handed me this ashtray and told me to open it. I twisted and turned and nothing happened. Feeling foolish I handed it back to him and, like a wizard, he took out a pin and pricked a hole and the ashtray popped open to reveal:

The open ashtray with a minox camera inside.

This cigarette case looks like it’s out of a James Bond movie. Wait until you see what’s inside this one:

Talk about James Bond, this one looks like a Dick Tracy wristwatch! It’s actually a finely crafted expensive Swiss tessina 35 mm miniature camera.

Need a light? Ok, one last smoking-related container hiding a code table.

And they say necessity is the mother of invention: This bra hides a F 21 Soviet observation camera. Spies could wear this under a light summer dress without being noticed.

In case you’re wondering what the tiny camera on the cover of the book is, this is a similar “microdot” camera with a remote release. It’s about as big as my thumbnail, featured on the cover of the book.

Any dog lovers out there? These yellow dust cloths stuffed in jam jars became synonymous with Stasi perversity. I quickly found out it was in fact a criminalistic technique. As any dog lover knows, dogs have an incredible sense of smell and could match a persons’ smell with the conserved smell in the jar.